Latin America's water crisis is not about millennials' avocado habit, but the human and environmental impact of food production

This kind of rhetoric plays into the schadenfreude that comes as a generation’s smug attempts to be 'woke' backfire, but in a game of food basket whack-a-mole, you ditch one product only for another to be revealed as equally ethically dubious

It’s counterproductive to pin the blame on people making an effort to minimise their environmental impact through changes to their diet (Reuters)

Avocado-munching millennials are under fire again. First, it was the smashed avocado toast controversy. Now, Chilean water rights activists are speaking out about how plantations in a region supplying avocados to Britain are illegally tapping into water that locals depend on. It’s a problem, for sure – but relentlessly shaming millennials over their diets won’t solve South America’s water issues. It’s more complicated than that.

Villagers from Petorca in the Valparaíso growing region have said they don’t have enough water to cook and wash, and have to resort to contaminated water brought in by truck. British demand for avocados soared 27 per cent in 2017, and many of those came from Chile. Oh dear.

The news has prompted a flurry of criticism. “When they say guac is extra, they mean that your avocado obsession is leaving thousands in Chile disenfranchised and plagued by drought,” Vice admonishes us.

The tone is reminiscent of a 2013 debate about quinoa, when reports surfaced that demand for quinoa was driving up prices in its native Andean region, raising concerns about whether poor Peruvians and Bolivians could afford to eat it. “Can vegans stomach the unpalatable truth about quinoa?” demanded one indignant op-ed.

Stories like this are popular because they play into the schadenfreude that comes as a generation’s smug attempts to be “woke” about food backfire – but the criticisms don’t always stand up to scrutiny. Studies later found the suggestion that rising quinoa prices were starving poor farmers was wrong, although there are now concerns that global demand is prompting a boom and bust effect.

This kind of coverage pushes the idea that faddish millennial eating habits are the root cause of corporate malfeasance in agriculture. They aren’t. The answer is more complex than that, and it’s counterproductive to pin the blame on people making an effort to minimise their environmental impact through changes to their diet, such as by becoming vegetarian or vegan.

Although avocados consume more water than many crops, they fall well short of the water footprint of meat, which is also a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The calculations on just how harmful a large water footprint is depend on a number of factors, but the role of the meat industry in water consumption has been repeatedly highlighted by the likes of the UN.

This problem cannot be pinned on avocados alone – in neighbouring Peru, asparagus has also been blamed for causing water shortages. Further afield, sugarcane has been linked with water problems in India. It’s not just agriculture, either. South America’s huge, water-intensive mining industry has a track record for cutting corners to access water and contaminating the water sources that do exist. By focusing solely on the latest eating trends, we’re ignoring crucial pieces of the puzzle.

The latest avocado scandal is a water access problem, and that reaches beyond one region in Chile. When put like this, it seems ridiculous to point the finger at young people with a growing taste for avocados: even if we stop eating them entirely, we will soon find ourselves faced with the same problem elsewhere. It might be a different place and a different crop, but the pattern is the same. In a game of food basket whack-a-mole, you ditch one product only for another to be revealed as equally ethically dubious. If we want to minimise the human and environmental harm involved in producing the food we eat, we need to take a different approach.

When every so-called food scandal is reported as a revelation, we fail to realise that they are part of a larger pattern; that what we’re seeing is not new or an isolated phenomenon, but rather one manifestation of something that goes much deeper. An example of this is the periodic coverage given to human rights abuses in the seafood industry, where NGOs and international organisations have been reporting on trafficking and abuse since at least 2009. When reporters cover the topic, it is usually portrayed as a revelation. The real question they should be asking is why is this still happening when we’ve known about it for years?

While boycotts of individual foods and products can spur companies into action, it’s important not to lose sight of underlying patterns of abuse. In this case, the Chilean government needs to defend its people’s right to water, large-scale agricultural producers need to respect the law, and supermarkets need to monitor their supply chains more carefully.

There probably isn’t a once-and-for-all solution. In a pipeline of contractors, subcontractors, exporters and supermarkets, it can be hard to tell where problems first creep in and who knows about them. But a vital first step is to show companies at every stage of the supply chain that we know this isn’t a one off – and we’re pissed off. Scapegoating millennials is misplaced and counterproductive. After all, it’s not as though we can just give up food.